Smokin' Joe - the real Rocky, hands down

Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011
By Steve Janoski

‘Tell them Rocky was not a champion. Joe Frazier was. Tell them Rocky is fictitious, Joe was reality. Rocky’s fists are frozen in stone. Joe’s fists are smoking,’

- Jesse Jackson

It may as well have been Hector and Achilles, with the minor difference that instead of being fought outside the stone walls of Troy, it was inside the ring ropes in Manila.

It was October 1975, and the two legends were locked in their final battle for heavyweight supremacy, going toe-to-toe in an epic brawl that even now, nearly four decades later, is every bit as amazing.

The seventh round had just begun, and, after a slow start, Joe Frazier was coming on strong. He had punished Muhammad Ali in the sixth, bobbing and weaving his way in with crossed forearms before unleashing his devastating left hooks to the body and head to tremendous effect.

The battering stunned even Ali, who, sometime in the middle of the round when the fighters’ heads were close, whispered into Frazier’s ear.

"Joe, they told me you was all washed up," Ali said.

"They told you wrong pretty boy," he growled back.

And if one story could ever epitomize the man we knew as "Smokin’ Joe," it was that one. No, Frazier wasn’t pretty, or eloquent, or privileged, but then to be heavyweight champ, he didn’t have to be.

Norman Mailer once wrote that Frazier was "twice as black and half as handsome" as his arch-nemesis, and he was as gritty as those Philadelphia streets he came from.

His fighting style was an unrelenting, swarming nightmare that saw him take punch after punch just to land his signature left hook. When he did, it would land with every bit of the force that his broad, 5 foot 11 inch, 205 pound frame could muster, and only two fighters — Ali and George Foreman — could ever stand up to it.

The twelfth child of poor black sharecroppers from Beaufort, South Carolina, he made his first heavy bag out of a burlap sack filled with a combination of rags and Spanish moss with a brick in the middle to give it some weight.

He left the South after a run-in with a white farm owner made it clear that he couldn’t play the subservient black man in the Jim Crow South, and ended up working in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, boxing on the side and using the slabs of animal carcasses as the occasional punching bag – sound familiar?

The trainer Yank Durham noticed the young man, thought he had some talent, and started him down the path that would lead to the gold medal at the 1964 Olympics and the heavyweight championship in 1968.

Some thought that Frazier’s title wasn’t legitimate because he hadn’t taken it from the previous champ; Ali had been stripped of it earlier that year after refusing to be inducted into the military. Frazier, however, quieted the naysayers when he convincingly beat Ali in their first fight in 1971, which was billed the "Fight of the Century."

They would fight twice more, with the third match carved into the history books as the "Thrilla’ in Manila," a brutal affair that beat both men past the limits of human endurance. Later on, Ali said that it was the closest he’d ever felt to dying.

Frazier’s corner would move to stop the fight just before the fourteenth round because their fighter’s one good eye — he was legally blind in his left eye for most of his life but never told anyone except his trainer — was closing, leaving him unable to see the punches coming.

Unknown to Frazier’s trainer, however, Ali’s corner was trying to convince their man to keep going, even as he was asking them to cut off his gloves.

But Frazier’s corner ended it first; as soon as they did, Ali stood up, his hands in the air, and promptly passed out.

"Man, I hit him with punches that’d bring down the walls of a city," Frazier said afterwards. "Lawdy, Lawdy, he’s a great champion."

In the years after the fight, Ali would become "Muhammad Ali," and receive all the plaudits associated with being who he was.

Frazier, however, faded from the minds of the regular American, and became known more as the second man in the Google search term "Ali vs. Frazier" than for what he really was: Ali’s true foil, the Hector to his Achilles, the Napoleon to his Wellington.

And when he died of liver cancer on Nov. 7, for the first time in many years the people outside the boxing community stood up and took notice of him. They called him a great champion, a great man, an ambassador for a sport too often filled with some of the worst people in humanity.

I wonder how many of those people were anywhere to be found in the past decade, which saw one of America’s sporting heroes living in a small room above his Philadelphia boxing gym, grappling with the same financial woes that strike so many ex-champs after their days of glory have faded.

But mostly, I wonder when the City of Philadelphia is going to do its duty, finally, and replace the statue of the fictional character of Rocky with a statue of their real hometown champ, the man who was not only the heavyweight champ back when that title meant something, but symbolized the values that America once prided itself on.

He was a tenacious blue-collar hero who rose up in the face of overwhelming poverty and racism, and outworked his lack of size or talent and turned it into an Olympic gold medal. He took on the mythical Ali and beat him when nobody thought that was possible, all the while staying a true gentleman outside the ring he once owned.

Even if it cannot bear to part with its statue of the movie character, the city owes it to their adopted son to do something to commemorate the man who actually ran the streets of its city, actually fought out of its abrasive atmosphere, with something that will stand proudly, arms raised in triumph, as Frazier did so many times himself.

Philadelphia, you owe him that.

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